"The idyllic tableau of peace and genteel elegance was the image he [Twain] wanted seen and remembered. The carefully cultivated projection of a happy family, an elderly father with his patrician daughters (both looking well and pretty), was an opportunity for the media-savvy Twain to recapture some of the credibility he must have felt he had lost in his battle with Isabel and Ashcroft."

From Mark Twain's Other Woman by Laura Skandera Trombley. It explores the forgotten media scandals and controversies that plagued the last years of Twain.